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The Bay of Marseille, Seen from L'Estaque

Impressionist sea landscape, tan houses, blue ocean, distant mountains.
CC0 Public Domain Designation

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  • Impressionist sea landscape, tan houses, blue ocean, distant mountains.

Date:

c. 1885

Artist:

Paul Cezanne
French, 1839-1906

About this artwork

In a letter to his friend and teacher Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne compared the view of the sea from L’Estaque to a playing card, with its simple shapes and colors. The landscape’s configuration and color fascinated him. This painting is one of more than a dozen such vistas created by the artist during the 1880s. Cézanne divided the canvas into four zones—architecture, water, mountain, and sky. Although these four elements are seen repeatedly in Impressionist paintings, Cézanne’s work is very different from that of his fellow artists. Whereas their primary purpose was to record the transient effects of light, Cézanne was interested in the underlying structure and composition of the views he painted. Filling the canvas with shapes defined by strong, contrasting colors and a complex grid of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines, he created a highly compact, dynamic pattern of water, sky, land, and village that at once refers back to traditionally structured landscape paintings and looks forward to the innovations of Cubism. Using blocklike brushstrokes to build the space, Cézanne created a composition that seems both two- and three-dimensional. Not locked tightly in place, his forms appear to touch and shift continually, creating a sense of volume and space that strengthens the composition and brings it to life.

Status

On View, Gallery 248

Department

Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Artist

Paul Cezanne

Title

The Bay of Marseille, Seen from L'Estaque

Place

France (Artist's nationality:)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

1880–1890

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

80.2 × 100.6 cm (31 5/8 × 39 5/8 in.)

Credit Line

Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection

Reference Number

1933.1116

IIIF Manifest  The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world.

Learn more.

https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/16487/manifest.json

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

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